In that case, the actual error would be that they don’t keep their accounts up to date. Running a business isn’t like balancing a personal account. They don’t just do the bills once a month. They need to know their cashflow at all times. Otherwise, they’d never be able to, for example, balance their registers or know if cash was going missing. In this particular case, you know they didn’t wait until after the furniture was delivered to take the payment. If this is mistake was real, it would have been spotted when they entered the sale in their records.
There is no high horse to climb up on and you’ve presented a false analogy. I addressed clerical error in my first reply. It’s not the same thing as trying to alter the agreed upon terms of a completed transaction.
It doesn’t matter. The offer was made, accepted and confirmed. The transaction was completed. Payment was accepted, merchandise was delivered. Win or lose, it’s over. Trying to renegotiate after the fact is unprofessional, severely damaging to the reputation of anyone who tries to do so and offensive to the other party.
This is the key factor. Own your mistake. Big boy rules. The salesman’s pay, assuming he is a commissioned salesman (which is a pretty safe bet) is dependent on his ability to make profitable sales. If he made a bad offer based on bad information, his recourse is with the provider of bad information. If he made a bad offer based on his own error, he has no recourse. Under no circumstances does he have recourse with the party that accepted his offer.
I think I would bet on this scenario as being the one in effect. Normally in a scenario like this the store manager would scream the salesman, eat the profit difference and move on. I’m guessing the salesman is on the hook for this difference and wants to take it off his shoulders. Honestly as a sales person myself given the relatively small amount of overall dollars we’re talking about to do this is kind of poor form.
Update: I replied to the email saying that I paid the quoted price so there’s nothing for me to correct. I’m still debating whether to contact the store and ask if it’s their policy to try and change the price after furniture has been delivered.
The manager can’t stop the practice unless s/he knows about it.
Back when I was hypothetically shopping for furniture, I presumably looked at a number of different stores, and at a number of different products at each store. The one I eventually chose to buy, I presumably chose in part because of its cost. Maybe, for instance, I saw another chair just like that one at another shop, but $15 more expensive, and so I chose this one.
Well, then, in that case, if the chair I actually bought had had a price tag on it that was $300 higher than what I actually paid, then in that case I wouldn’t have bought that chair; I would have bought the other one at the other shop. Which means that I didn’t actually pay $300 less than I “should have”; I only paid $15 less than I should have.
So no, it is not reasonable to expect me to fork over an extra $300. How much extra is it reasonable to expect me to fork over? I only see one logical place to draw the line, at 0. We made a deal, we agreed to it, and I might not have agreed to it if the deal were different.
On top of everything else: even if you paid the extra, how do you know that will be the end of it? Is there anything stopping them coming back again to say it was really supposed to be $1,900 and not $1,800 nor $1,500?
I believe that is entirely true without throwing in additional facts. If I go to a car dealership, we agree on a price, set it down in writing with no contingencies* and they receive payment from me, then the car is mine, period. They can’t come back at the end of the month with ‘oh, actually we were thinking the dealer price was different, you owe us more money’ and force me to pay it. I challenge you or ‘the lawyers on this board’ to provide a cite of that scenario actually happening, it should be easy to do if such a thing is possible.
- Auto dealers do a lot of shady stuff with financing, like offering a deal then finding ‘oh, the finance company didn’t approve that deal’, but that’s not the scenario being talked about here.
I would consider your scenario a scam. If a person who works at a business doesn’t like the terms of employment with their boss, it’s between them and the boss/business. Trying to get me, a third party who made a simple, honest transaction at the store. Trying to guilt that third party into giving the salesman money he’s not entitled to is trying to scam a person who doesn’t owe any money out of money.
Also, if the boss isn’t in on the scam, the employee is likely to lose his job when you complain to the store about the scam. The employee didn’t think through how bad this looks on the employer side of the fence, and will likely have to learn the hard way that businesses tend to frown on you taking money directly from customers for personal gain outside of legitimate channels at the store, without even getting into the kind of damage this does to the store’s reputation.
An aside I thought of reading this post: what if, on the way back to the dealership, a Porche ran a red light and t-boned you and the car you were trying to return? Could the dealership still demand the extra money?